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Textual harassment

ADAM SMYTH

Published: 19 December 2011

I
n May 1962, Old Street Magistrates Court found Joe Orton and Kenneth
Halliwell guilty of acts of “sheer malice and destruction from which the
public must be protected”. Their crime was the theft and defacement of
library books. Angered by shelves full of “rubbishy novels”, the pair
removed books from local libraries and, back at their bedsit, remade them.
They created collage covers and dust-jacket blurbs. The results are, among
other things, very funny. Bursts of laughter punctuate the quiet of the
Islington Museum where Malicious Damage, an exhibition of Orton and
Halliwell’s book doctoring, is currently being shown. A gibbon’s face adorns
the Collins Guide to Roses (“a quite lovely book”, the prosecution
lamented); The Collected Plays of Emlyn Williams contains new titles
(“Knickers Must Fall”; “Fucked By Monty”); and the dust-jacket photo of
Richard G. Stern (“Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Chicago”) has been replaced with an image of actress Hedda Hopper in a
feathered bonnet. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Clouds of Witness, featuring her
aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, has a new blurb: “READ THIS BEHIND
CLOSED DOORS! And have a good shit while you are reading!”.

Orton’s defacements were provoked by the same anger at middlebrow myopia that
led him to fake letters of outrage from “Edna Welthorpe (Mrs)” in response
to his own plays (“I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental
and physical perversion”, etc). Orton had depended on libraries to read his
way from working-class Leicester to RADA, and was frustrated by Islington’s
wasted shelves of “rubbishy books”. “I know what I did was wrong”, he said,
“but I’m just unrepentant.” The heavy six-month prison sentence Orton and
Halliwell received reflects the homophobic atmosphere of their trial
(“Because we were queers”, answered Orton, asked to explain the verdict),
and also a moment in the history of reading when libraries were respected
public institutions.

as good almost kill a man as kill a good book If six months seems harsh,
legal and moral responses to acts of book defacement are often severe: the
1962 prosecuting counsel claimed “in some thirty years of experience I have
never seen anything of this nature before”. Damaging a book is figured as a
crime that does more than material harm: “as good almost kill a man”, wrote
John Milton in 1644, “as kill a good book”. But there is a long history of
writers purposefully defacing texts to express not hostility, but
bibliophilia. One early setting for Bible destruction was the Anglican
community at Little Gidding, near Cambridge, founded by Nicholas Ferrar in
1625. Ferrar’s nieces cut up printed Gospels, often word by word, and then
glued the fragments into a new order. This was cut-and-paste four centuries
before word-processing. The aim was to produce texts that “harmonized”
differences between the four accounts of Christ’s life. Ferrar’s nieces
added images, creating collages of sheep, doves and stalking foxes: like
Orton and Halliwell, they had a weakness for animals. The experience of
reading these lavish Harmonies is a combination of marvelling at the
assembled text, and awareness of the slicing that preceded that assembling:
the books are poised on the border of destruction and creativity. This is
biblical scholarship conveyed in the format of the ransom note. Today, the
destruction of religious texts (like Pastor Terry Jones’s threat to burn the
Qur’an) is taboo, but the Ferrars saw Bible-cutting as a pious act, an
extension of an active Protestant mode of reading; a way of caring about the
Word.

Eighteenth-century book-doctoring, in the form of extra-illustration,
sustained this sense of book modification as an expression of respect. James
Granger’s Bibliographical History of England (1769) invited readers to
insert their own prints – cut from other books, or bought separately.
“Grangerizing” became fashionable: readers converted mass-produced books
into unique texts, personalized to taste, and the book was an unfinished
object, awaiting the glueing in of prints.

A month in Yorkshire with Stanley’s rear In the twentieth century,
book defacement became an art form, seen in the ongoing work of Tom
Phillips. In 1965, Phillips, fascinated by the cut-up techniques of William
Burroughs, bought a copy of W. H. Mallock’s forgotten novel, A Human
Document (1892), from a second-hand furniture store in south London, and set
about turning it into something new: A Humument. Each page was “treated”:
the majority of the text obscured by painted images to leave visible a
trickle of words that told a new story – the love between Irma and Toge (the
latter appearing whenever Mallock wrote “together”). Much of Phillips’s
humour comes from the surreally bawdy dialogue constructed out of Mallock’s
dry Victorian prose: “Evening Arthur, calm your member”; “A month in
Yorkshire with Stanley’s rear”. While Orton’s attacks on middlebrow books
were iconoclastic, A Humument is a respectful, playful response to Mallock’s
novel: “I owe him rather a lot”, Phillips has said.

The novelist Jonathan Safran Foer also cut into an old text to reveal a new
story, in The Tree of Codes (2010). Safran Foer took scissors to the book
that was most important to him, The Street Of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (a
Jewish writer murdered by the Nazis in 1942), removing much of the original
to leave a story that was new, but also already there (snipping seven
letters from Street of Crocodiles leaves Tree of Codes). The book is a
miracle of design: each page a frail assemblage of tatters, the gaps as
meaningful as the text. Like the Ferrars at Little Gidding, Safran Foer’s
authorship-through-cutting expresses reverence for his source. “Some things
you love passively,” he said, “some you love actively. In this case, I felt
the compulsion to do something with it.”

What will happen to book defacement in the digital age? Works such as The Tree
of Codes rely on their physical form: but there is no materiality on screen.
Phillips has launched an ingenious Humument iPhone app, but it doesn’t
convey the sense of Phillips physically remaking Mallock’s novel. One
surprising consequence of digitization has been the destruction of books:
libraries have cleared shelves of texts by pointing to digital alternatives.
The emerging sense of the frailty of the printed book in the digital era may
give rise to a renewed interest in books, and defaced books, that only make
sense as embodied objects.

Adam Smyth teaches Renaissance Literature at Birkbeck, University of
London. His most recent book, Autobiography in Early Modern England, was
published last year.